For want of a better title…

I’m not sure if I’m ready to write this, but I want to try before I forget too much.

I delayed my birthday this year to Saturday June 6th because my wife was out of town until then. When my fake birthday arrived, she presented me with a gift that was completely unexpected - a kitten. A beautiful little lynx-point Siamese.

Hiding beind my notebook

There were reasons beyond just the fact that I like cats and still miss our old storm cat that I’ll mention, but I had no idea she was going to do this.

I almost spoiled the surprise, in fact. When Vicki and the kids go to the pet store for any reason they always spend a few minutes looking at the cats and kittens up for adoption. And we were out of cat litter, so I called her to ask her to pick some up, but what I said was “you need to make an urgent stop to look at kitties.” Meaning to go to the pet store, but she thought I was referring to the kitten she already with her in the car, and I heard stunned silence for a moment. Fortunately I explained myself before she asked how I knew what she was doing.

So she and the kids brought in birthday cards and a cardboard Exquisicat box with holes in it. Which looked like a box for a kitten, but Exquisicat was the brand of catbox liners we use, which I’d asked her to get, so I figured she’d got the box with the liners and had some elaborate joke in mind. (There’s another story to that, too, but it doesn’t belong here.) So I grinned and opened the box and said “Oh, my god, it really is a kitten.”

Simon has a female Siamese, and Vicki has always intended to breed her once; this is the additional motive for getting a male Siamese, and I recognized that, but it doesn’t detract from having my own kitten. She even promised not to steal him - she has a way with cats, and they all gravitate to her, but with the kitten (as with Simon’s Lavender) she promised to try not to take over.

He was a skinny little thing. From a breeder, which isn’t how we’d usually acquire a cat, but pure Siamese don’t turn up in the rescued cages. He had piercing grey eyes and a gentle purr, and he took to me immediately. He would sit on my chest, sphinx-like rather than curled up, with all of his claws sinking into me. (Siamese claws aren’t fully retractable.) Occasionally he’d climb so high I couldn’t lower my head because he’d be wedged under my chin.

I worried about him not eating or drinking. He seemed to be doing, because he’d use his litter tray (usually), but I rarely saw him eat, and when he went to the water bowl he’d splash his face a couple of times but not start lapping.

I also worried about him interacting with Lavender. She hissed and spat at him for about two days, but then she started playing with him, and even mothered him, cleaning him up. He started following her around the house, and if I ever couldn’t find him, I’d just look for Lavender, because he would be close by. When I came home from work, Lavender would run to the door making her Siamese yowls, while the kitten would trail behind with high-pitched meeps.

I had no name for him. I didn’t want to name him until I’d found one that I really liked, so he remained “the kitten.”

Basil and Lavender

I still have text messages from that week in my phone where I was letting Vicki know how well he was doing. On Thursday morning I texted her that he had woken me up at 5:30, climbing up me (claws digging in securely) to perch on my arm. Later that day I texted her again that I’d seen him drinking from his water bowl.

Elliot suggested the name Basil, and I thought about it for a while.

Friday I had to stay home until a tech arrived for our air conditioner service. I ran a bath, but then the tech called and I didn’t have time to take it. Vicki got back into town, and I took the opportunity to get to work. During the day I decided that Elliot was right. The kitten’s name was Basil. Not Bay-zil, the English pronunciation, Bazzil, like Basil Fawlty or Basil the Rat (both from Fawlty Towers). As small as he was he was like a little rat, and Basil the Cat seemed perfect.

She had to go into the office too, so we met quite late for dinner, and then I headed home while she and Simon stopped by the drug store.

When I arrived home, it was quiet. After being greeted by both cats for several days in a row, that felt wrong. I called out, and Lavender answered from the bedroom, but there was no echoing meep. The bathroom door was open, and I knew what I was going to find before I went in.

Basil - poor, tiny little Basil - was floating on the top of the water in the bath that I’d forgotten to empty. He was cold and already stiffening. When I picked him up and held him close the last breath from his tiny lungs made him meow.

I had to call Vicki. I couldn’t stand the thought of what I’d done to that lovely little kitten. She and Simon were heartbroken, too. They hurried home, and when they saw his little bedraggled body they wailed as much as I was doing.

I buried the kitten in our yard, alongside our old Pepper cat (the first cat we ever owned) and Boober. I spent a week bonding with that precious little kitten, and he died to my stupidity. I didn’t even get to use his name while he was alive, only saying goodbye to little Basil as I laid him to rest.

The breeder was sympathetic enough to let us have Basil’s brother, although she was also upset by his loss. I wasn’t very fun company that weekend.

Parsley, the new kitten, is much like Basil - which I’d hoped would be true. Getting to know him has helped dull the heartache. Sometimes a whole ten minutes passes now without me remembering the little limp body in the bathtub. He’ll be everything that Basil could have been. He’s maybe a little more adventurous, and a little more interested in people than in following Lavender around everywhere - but I don’t like to compare them. I feel that if I do I’ll be finding fault with Basil in some way. So while I’m glad to have the new kitten, Basil’s memory is compartmented, and I think I’ll always miss him.

When I first came to the US, I didn’t consider that it would eventually become my home. After I took up residence here, I don’t think I ever quite believed it would be permanent. Even after I married, I think I assumed that sooner or later we’d move back to the UK. The more I realize that in reality I’m now here permanently, the more I miss the rest of my family, and understand that I’ve never come to terms with being 5,000 miles from them.

That’s not what this entry is about, though. Apart from family and intangibles, like the Yorkshire countryside, or the sea being within driving distance, there isn’t much that I regret not having.

What I do miss are some specific food items. Real bacon, not the thin, streaky, fatty stuff I can get in the grocery store, good as some of it is. Chocolate. Fish and chips. And most of all, milk.

I’m from Hull, former fishing port, and still home to the largest concentration of fish and chip shops (with generally good fish). I think it’s probably harder for a Hull native to be deprived of fish and chips than most other Brits. But I’ve found that when I travel to England I can eat fish and chips a few times to satisfy the craving, and then ignore it for the rest of the vacation.

I don’t know why American chocolate is so bitter and stale-tasting compared to British chocolate, but it is. It’s the added paraffin wax or lack of cocoa butter or something. Even the same candy here is formulated differently, and it’s such a disappointment that I find it easy to avoid. A regular bar of Cadbury’s beats even chocolates from expensive shops here, and Galaxy is completely out of the league of US chocolate - with the one exception I’ve found of the Newman’s Own brand, which is quite delicious and not bitter, dark or milk. The late Paul Newman makes good chocolate…

Anyway, Kroger has started carrying Galaxy. Only small bars and Minstrels (chocolate-candy covered chocolates, like oversized M&Ms with the bitterness removed), but a few small bars is still cheaper than the postage for my mother to send me a large bar. So I no longer need to gripe about chocolates.

Milk, though. That has been a problem since I first came here, 29 years ago. Some milk is better than others, but the best I can find tastes bland compared to regular cheap grocery milk on the other side of the pond. And that isn’t something my mother can send.

And then a few months back, I was visiting Whole Foods in Plano, and I found milk from “Remember When Dairy.” I bought it by accident, in fact. Organic milk was very expensive, and the price of this milk was about half (but it turned out I was looking at the wrong price; it’s about the same as certified organic). Then, when I got it home I noticed it said “shake well,” and realized it was non-homogenized milk. I’ve always prefered non-homogenized; even when you shake it up, it’s creamier. Unfortunately, even in the UK it’s hard to find now.

So I poured a glass and tried it - and it was every bit as good as the milk I grew up with. Better, even - the milk is from a Jersey herd. It’s organic, though not yet certified, so it can’t have the label, but it is. And much better than Whole Foods’s other organic products. The 2% milk is richer than any whole milk I’ve tried elsewhere.

As expensive as it was, and as awkward as it was to get to the Plano store, I made the trip several times. Life was good.

And then, a month or so after I discovered the milk, it started to vanish. I could get a couple of half-gallons occasionally, and then nothing at all.

I’ve tried to find out what has happened, and where I can still get the milk. The Lakewood Whole Foods is supposed to carry it, but when I tried to get some there was one half-gallon of 2%. A recent Morning News said that Central Market carried it, but I’ve never seen any, and the CM manager told me they’ve been trying to carry it, but their sales volume would be too low.

Now I have email from the Whole Foods store that may have more of the story. Apparently the dairy is currently out of business while they move from Texas to New Mexico, and they expect to resume shipments in 45 days. How believable that is, I don’t know. This was probably a very bad time to start a dairy, but if they’re really relocating rather than failing, and if they really plan to distribute the same products back to the DFW area, it doesn’t bother me whether or not they’re in Texas.

I’m hopeful. I’ll know in a couple of months whether to cry over spilt milk.

Now, if I could just find real bacon…

Edit: I forgot the main requirement of a Brit living in the US - a supply of decent tea. Fortunately that has never been very hard. I used to have to go to the Indian grocery for Typhoo or PG Tips. More recently, Central Market started carrying Yorkshire Tea (which is the best of all) and Kroger has PG Tips tea bags.

Central Market consolidated their tea section and eliminated Yorkshire Tea, and I was disappointed - until I discovered that Amazon.com carries it in both loose leaf and tea bag form. (Even Yorkshire Gold and Yorkshire Gold tea bags, though I don’t personally like that as much as plain old Yorkshire Tea.)

… is one who promises to pay for a senate seat, but then welshes on the agreement. Apparently.

Today’s not a very interesting news day. There’s very little to glean anywhere other than the inauguration of President Obama. It’s an historic event, that an African-American has reached the highest office in the free world.

And it is, there’s no question about that. But I can’t help feeling that the intense focus on the fact that the president black is missing the far more important fact that he’s well-educated, thoughtful and capable. We don’t need a president of a particular color, we need a president who is insightful enough to understand problems, confident enough to solicit contrary opinions, and strong enough to implement solutions. From all accounts, Obama is all of these.

What concerns me about the issue of race in this inauguration is that it is obscuring the fact that he was elected on his merits. If his election comes to be seen as the last word in affirmative action, rather than a mandate to the government to stop hiding from problems, then the Obama adminstration will lose much of its authority.

Maybe a lot of people voted for Obama because he’s black. (And maybe even more voted against him for the same reason - that would be my guess.) But he was elected because he demonstrated himself to be able to comprehend, and tough enough to act.

The election itself depressed me, because it demonstrated again how unpopular intelligence is in politics.  Obama was attacked because he’s a good speaker and able to reason through difficult questions without needing a teleprompter. He was portrayed as an intellectual elitist (the first always implying the second) and not a man of the people.  He refused to play the bumpkin, and was attacked for it, but the people, amazingly, decided that this time we should choose a smart guy over a plumber. Though it took an economic collapse to demonstrate just how much we need the smart guy.

I don’t want to see that derailed. I don’t want Obama’s victory over prejudice to be solely over racial prejudice. I want it to be seen to be over anti-intellectual prejudice, and I want the executive to be seen to be as capable as it certainly is.

When I see the words “President Obama” or even “First Lady Michele Obama” I feel a thrill of excitement - of a possibility of great things ahead. But I’m not excited - well, maybe a little - because we have a black president. I’m excited because we have a president who will be able to apply real intelligence rather than hide behind hubris

How to make your house scary for Halloween without great expense:

“This strategy has succeeded. And we are winning in Iraq. And we will come home with victory and with honor.” Senator McCain in the first 2008 presidential debate.

Among many stories of the consequences of our invasion of Iraq is this one. I heard it last week on All Things Considered. If this is the outcome of “victory,” there is no honor in it, only shame.

Vicki’s tropical fish tank has been set up for years, and I hadn’t realized how run-down it was getting until we started working on it a few months back. Adding some new angel fish was a bad idea; we introduced a disease that killed off all but one of our clown loaches and all but one of the new angel fish. Either that or the water quality problems that we already had were borderline-dangerous, and adding the new fish pushed it beyond livable.

Whatever the reason, we’ve cleaned up the tank nicely, added a vastly better light with a clear glass top - that’s when I realized just how gloomy it had become - cleaned the sides, and started adding more fish.

We’ve always liked the clown loaches more than any of the other fish we’ve had, because they have such interesting behaviors. I would say that they have personalities, if ascribing a personality to a cold water creature with barely a brain wasn’t such a stretch. They school, they find the strangest places to hide, they can sleep - or at least, be inactive - in odd positions. So it was a big disappointment to lose two of the three after having them for so many years.

The final loach hid behind his rock, and we rarely saw him. After I added the light, he started following the angel fish around occasionally - not exactly schooling, but usually being in the same part of the tank.

Then, when we added plants and several other fish, he spent all of his time out in the open. He nibbled on the plants and swam around with the brightly colored neon tetras. Vicki was especially happy to see him out and about all the time, and we plan to add more clown loaches.

But… apparently our water quaility problems aren’t over, or at least we have some issue still that affects tetras. All of the red tetras we added died very quickly. The neons took a little longer, but they started to succumb. I know that tetras are sensitive to some kinds of water conditions; you can’t make the water slightly brackish, which helps keep most fish healthy, because salt is toxic to tetras. I don’t think we have any salt in the water, but Texas hard water may have other problems, and I need to look at what might be going on before I try adding more tetras.

Everything else is fine. The catfish, the gouramis, the one angel fish that we still had, and the loach, all seem healthy. The plants are doing fine. But for a couple of days I was flushing tetras when I found them (and there are several I haven’t accounted for).

Then, yesterday morning, I saw what must be the oddest thing I’ve ever encountered in years of keeping tropical fish. The clown loach was swimming around with a dead neon tetra in its mouth.

It wasn’t eating it. It was just carring it around the tank. It looked as if - and, of course, this is even more ridiculous than claiming that a fish has a personality - it looked as if the loach had found one of the fish it had been schooling with, and wasn’t willing to let it go.

Yeah, it’s ridiculous - but since yesterday morning, the loach has gone back to his old hiding place. He doesn’t come out from behind his rock.

I’m sure that there are good reasons for the events, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that I saw the end of a tiny tragedy.

Will Microsoft ever realize that popping up a dialog while I’m working is a bad idea? I’m tying away when a dialog popus up, and the next key stroke has a random effect on it. The number of installations I’ve screwed up by accidentally responding to dialogs may be part of the reason my Windows always becomes unstable.

The Apple user interface has an irritating bouncy icon that lets you know when another program requires your attention. Which is fine; it is as obvious as the Windows-style modal dialog, but it doesn’t start stealing your keystrokes and acting on them.

This morning I wiped out Firefox and Adobe Reader because some ugliness between them makes Firefox go into a loop of loading / attempting to render that it never gets out of. I had to cancel and restart re-installing Adobe because of a stupid popup dialog that I dismissed without seeing what it was while I was typing a message. Even afterwards, Firefox and Adobe have the same problem - but in a virtual machine Firefox and Adobe co-exist perfectly well. So something in another Windows component is breaking it.

Maybe it’s another application that’s only partly installed. Or maybe it’s Skype, which apparently has hooked into Firefox, redirecting it to the Skype website even after a full, clean install. Which is another one of the ridiculous program practises that we’ve come to accept - no way in hell would I have allowed Skype to do that, if I’d been prompted, but with no application security, the installer can do what it likes.

I was paying last month’s cellphone bill this week and found a charge I didn’t recognize on Simon’s phone. He’s 11, and shouldn’t be incurring extra charges. He did have a couple of games that Vicki told him he could download, but this wasn’t one of them.

AT&T couldn’t tell me anything about the charge. That seems odd; they apparently have the right to put something on my bill without giving me any justification. The operator did tell me how to find out who’d originated it (”google SJA Mobile”). So I did, and found SJA Mobile’s website. Interestingly absent is any useful information, like what they do, or what I could be paying for. Though they do offer a “no questions asked” refund.

Googling further becomes more interesting. There are dozens of blogs that claim that SJA Mobile provides a useful service, but none of them say what it is. Paid advertising? Dunno, it seems to me that without identifying the service you’re not going to sell much. Yet, for the same reason, they’re unlikely to be unsolicited testimonials.

The only site I found that gave me anything of interest was Skydeck’s blog, here and here. The text and comments make it pretty clear that SJA Mobile is or is involved in scamming. SJA initiated billing the blog writer after sending him the text message ”… “, with no action on his part. It seems that SJA Mobile is perpetrating cramming.

In my case, though, there was a reason behind the cramming. I was reluctant to follow SJA Mobile’s procedure to get my “no questions asked” refund, because I felt it would be implicitly legitimizing their charge. On the other hand, I didn’t really want to ask AT&T to remove the charge as disputed, when there was any possibility that it might be legitimate. So I did follow the SJA procedure, requested a refund, and texted STOP to the SJA number.

In response to the STOP, I got a text message from “ultimate-game-cheats.net” saying I was unsubscribed. I asked Simon, and he said yes, he’d given them his cell number to get help with a computer game. (Aside: never use a paid service for a computer game when GameFaqs.org has everything you’d ever need.) He said he’d been unable to get off the list, and didn’t know that it was costing us money.

Ultimate-game-cheats is not obfuscating the fact that signing up is $10/month. Not much, anyway. Certainly the “enter your cell # for the site password” is in much bigger and brighter text than the fine print, but the fine print is quite readable, It even mentions the subscription fee in two places.

Does that make the site and the charges legitimate? Well, that’s the reason I’m posting this. I don’t think so, and I think there’s a nasty near-scam going on here, abetted by AT&T and the other carriers who allow SJA Mobile billing rights.

I readily acknowledge that the charge was initiated by Simon’s providing the cell #, even though the site says that there will be a recurring $9.99 charge, that you must be 14 years or older, and that you must have your parents’ permission.

However, the company (ultimate-game-cheats) takes no steps to verify age. Yeah, it’s not an easy thing to do, but here it’s non-existent. Some sites (”adult” sites) require credit cards partly as an age verification mechanism. A cell # doesn’t even begin to imply adulthood or financial responsibility. Plenty of kids have cellphones. I’m fairly sure that a Texas court wouldn’t hold that an 11-year-old kid clicking on a link (even one that says don’t click unless you’re 14) would satisfy the legal requirement for establishing a contract.

I see no indication on the page that this is a real service. I see nowhere to enter the password that the company claims it will send. Perhaps the text message includes other access instructions - or perhaps it is entirely a scam.

Even if not, the site targets kids, encourages them to sign up, committing their parents to paying. If this isn’t exactly a scam, it’s at least misleading.

SJA Mobile has a duty to ensure that the charges that they bill to AT&T on behalf of Ultimate-game-cheats is legitimate. Clearly they do not do that.

AT&T apparently is willing to charge a customer based on zero justification for the charge from SJA Mobile. I’m sure that their contact with SJA Mobile requires that SJA authenticates its charges, but I’m not a party to that agreement, SJA doesn’t authenticate, and AT&T doesn’t police. So I’m left financially responsible for a specious charge.

Two aspects of this system particularly disturb me. First, that I don’t have a way to opt out. AT&T has no provision for me to say “don’t add third-party charges to my bill.” They’re free to add whatever they want, and I have to either pay or challenge it. My cell # has been turned into a payment ID, like a credit card, but unlike a credit card, I can’t cut it up and throw it away. I’m part of a new monetary system that I didn’t sign up for, and don’t want.

The second is a corollary to the first. Since a cell # has become a source of credit funding, any kid with a cell phone now has access to their parents’ funds. Subject to reading the bill’s details (how many parents know to do that? Or are likely to wade through every line? My bill was twelve pages) parents could well be funding all kinds of illicit activities. Possibly canceling text messaging would solve the problem - if the end provider was responsible enough to require receipt of a text message. (The “…” text would argue against that always being the case.) But texting is a given for kids these days.

Until the phone companies install a rational opt-in system for third-party charges, I have no option but to scrutinize and challenge every bill, and to warn others to do the same. Maybe I’m becoming increasingly a Luddite, but this is a payment system that I don’t want to be a part of.

Update:

The link to ultimate-game-cheats.net has changed today. Instead of the signup page that was present two days ago, there’s a page that says “new registrations are temporarily unavailable due to routine maintenance.” There is a login page, with a password, which does imply that the game cheats service may be real.

After abandoning Graffiti 1, I’ve been using TealScript exclusively, and I have to say that I’m very happy with it. I haven’t spent my $30 yet, I’m still using introductory trial, but I certainly will be. It recognizes my Graffiti 1 letter construction better than the Graffiti 1 libraries (and better than my earlier Palm devices ever did). I haven’t even attempted to tune the character recognition.

It seems not to introduce any extra instability. (Saying that any particular package is stable on a LifeDrive really isn’t possible, given the instability of the device itself, but TealScript appears to be stable.) It has excellent documentation, and it seems that it has good support.

So I can finally get back to doing something useful with my LifeDrive - beyond playing Sudoku and watching videos.